PDCA = Please Don’t Change Anything!

When I heard this the first time, I giggled and thought it summarized very well the reaction it created among the attendants to this specific workshop: PDCA, or Plan, Do, Check, Act. Got to admit that Please Don’t Change Anything was the most common reaction I heard, rather than the acceptance and enthusiasm I was hoping for. Participants learned the techniques and tools all right, but would not apply them consistently once back in their offices. Just like with any tool, there are several problems with PDCA. While some may appear trivial, they can have strong cultural, personal and enterprise implications.

First, PDCA oversimplifies the entire process of improvement. The reason for this lies in its origin. The Japanese absorbed the lessons taught by Walter Shewart for how to improve a tight loop production process with process control using continuous measurement and statistical control techniques. Here I mean by a tight loop production process the set of activities in one production workstation, and not across multiple workstations/processes. They naturally described this in Japanese and not English. They were subsequently asked to describe their quality control loop in English (note that even today most Japanese have poor command of English and it was even rarer for Japanese in Shewart's time in Japan to be proficient in English) and came up with the simplest possible explanation which became: Plan Do Check Act. In fact the actual cycle is more detailed than that in the original japanese version. In real life, trying to use PDCA rarely succeed because it is a simplified abstraction and does not reflect the various activities required for successful improvement activities. For example, most serious improvement cycles have aspects such as sponsorship, leadership, coordination, communication, education, benchmarking and establishment of the modified process.

Second and related to the first problem, there is no real way to have continuous improvement. By definition, continuous means without interruption. If a company or any part of it is subject to continuous improvement, this implies continuous change. In such a situation people will become rapidly confused about the current status of processes and procedures and/or follow outdated practices. There is also the real problem of "change fatigue": when people who have to adjust continuously to change (improvement) then become confused, disenchanted or stop following changes altogether. Due to change fatigue, progress tends to grind to a halt. Change requires motivating people, and hence needs to recognize change fatigue and manage it. Change management needs to cover people, process and product. In reality, Shewart and Deming meant Continual Improvement, a cycle of improvement with pauses to consolidate the improvements (changes). These are then subject to checking or study to determine if they have actually improved the area of change, before the next improvement is started. At department or organizational level, improvement is a time and effort consuming activity that often requires substantial resources as well as time to consolidate change.

Third, Do and Act have the same meaning in English. The Compact Oxford dictionary provides the following relevant definitions:

Do ? verb, 1 perform or carry out (an action). 2 achieve or complete (a specified target). 3 act or progress in a specified way. 4 work on (something) to bring it to a required state.

?Act ? verb, 1 take action; do something. 2 take effect or have a particular effect. 3 behave in a specified way.

So PDCA could just as easily be PDCD or PACA! In other words: Plan-Do-Check-Do or Plan-Act-Check-Act! This is confusing, and PDCA can thereby seem trivial especially to uninformed colleagues. In reality, the real meaning of Act is Improve or Correct (when failing to achieve the desired state - see definition 4 of Do above)! Hence the cycle should read Plan-Do-Check-Improve or Plan-Do-Study-Improve. So the acronym would be PDCI or PDSI! Why did not Shewart and Deming improve their PDCA cycle? Because they felt it better to have people at least remember a simple idea about quality improvement rather than none at all.

Fourth, Shewart assumed that management or experts would act, not the ordinary worker. This is completely outdated thinking in most departments today.

Fifth, Plan has a limited range of meaning

PLAN ? verb, a detailed proposal for doing or achieving something. 2 an intention or decision about what one is going to do. (Compact Oxford)

It was not intended to cover aspects such as creative or innovative thinking (also called "outside the box" thinking) or handle complex adaptive systems. There are at least 12 modes of thinking, and Plan only covers a couple of these modes of thinking. This is an unrealistic restriction to the possible ways to improve.

Sixth, PDCA has an inherent circular paradigm (look at the Wikipedia entry if you don't believe me). It assumes that everything starts with Planning. I know that I do not plan everything. I challenge you to think about times you did not plan something. Did you take an action that was based upon thought but no planning? Was the outcome acceptable or unacceptable? I can recount many times that I did something without planning that was successful, but I cannot think of any time that I did something without some thought (even if it was reactive thinking). In fact, in areas such as innovation and invention it is sometimes better not to plan because this can stifle creativity! So I caution people to avoid assuming that PDCA is only used in a circular mode, in other words do not assume you must 'Plan Do Check Act'. It is possible to improve without doing everything in the assumed circular order (I may be branded a heretic for stating this :) )

Seventh and most importantly, people are not explicitly mentioned in the basic PDCA cycle. There is an assumption that people will use the cycle and make things happen. I am sure I am not the only person to have noticed that this assumption is not always true! Naturally, motivated people will look to improve but many people are neither motivated not interested in improvement. In fact the way people act and improve has strong cultural foundations. The modern Japanese worker has a completely different attitude to improvement from their colleagues of little more than half a century earlier (when workers did their job and were not allowed to suggest changes, and Shewart created PDCA). In that era, only senior managers could suggest and make changes. The modern Japanese worker of today also has a different attitude to improvement to an American or Portuguese or Russian or German worker today. The cultural differences mean that modern Japanese methods like the Toyota Production System that has been translated in America into Lean Manufacturing do not work as they do in Japan. One only has to look at the differences between the same products built in Japan versus USA to be aware of this (cars, TVs, etc.). This is also true between German and US car plants. The differences have little to do with the processes and the equipment (products) used, and everything to do with the people implementing the processes and running the equipment. It is the way people interact that determines how well processes run and products are created!

Therefore, as Deming himself encouraged, we should not just accept what we are told, but should learn, understand and intelligently adapt and improve what we learn to suit what we want to achieve, including PDCA. Use PDCA when it is suitable, use another LEAN method (DMAIC, SMED, Kanban, VSM, Kaizen, etc.) when PDCA is not suitable.

In time, after a lot of practice on LEAN tools, I have come to realize that, in order to introduce a new business practice, a change that expects people to do things differently – it is also necessary that they look at (the same) things differently. And for this a classroom training that focuses on the method itself alone, is insufficient. Spending time with the attitude of people is necessary to the success of implementing a new way of looking at, approaching and doing things. And if we think about it and relate to ourselves and what we actually end up doing….is there any other way?